Defending the Faith looks at the ancient matter of apologetics—traditionally understood as a branch of Christian theology aimed at building systematic intellectual defenses of doctrine—from a decidedly modern perspective. Rather than focus narrowly on theology, editors Weir and McLeod smartly focus more broadly on “religious competition”—moments and sites of religious confrontation—in the period from roughly 1920 to 1990, the period dominated in geopolitics by contestation among liberalism, fascism, and communism, by decolonization, and within Western liberal democracies by increasing though always uneven secularization. The editor's conception of “religious competition,” most significantly, includes secular and anti-religious forms of religious propaganda alongside the more conventionally religious, a framing that gives fresh life to “apologetics” as a category of analysis, here made newly relevant to the central geopolitical struggles of the era. While the book only marginally lives up to the “global history” of its subtitle—chapters on “The Apologetics of Decolonisation” in South and Southeast Asia, “Islam, Communism, and Moroccan Nationalism,” and the Cold War vision of Orthodox churches in Africa and Asia are the three of thirteen that address matters outside Europe or North America—the conceptual sweep and topical scope of the book are nevertheless impressive.

This sharp thematic framing, combined with chronological organization, gives the volume a clarity and coherence often lacking in edited volumes, even as it ranges across a wide variety of topics. Readers will learn about futurology in early 20th-century Britain, British converts to Islam, anti-Catholic legacies in anticommunism, the Cold War apologetics of Billy Graham, Soviet atheism, revelation and Jewish Orthodoxy, and much more. This is a book for scholars, certainly. Its detail and density will challenge the general reader. But scholars and students of religion and politics in the twentieth century—especially those interested in thinking comparatively, theoretically, and internationally—will find this collection of essays a valuable addition to their libraries and classrooms.